So Zach, Do You Like this Game so Far?

This morning
I made myself a nice cup of coffee. Not too black and with just a little bit of
milk. Oh but not too much milk, don't want to ruin a good cup of coffee now do
we? As I took my first sip of that delightful cup of joe I witnessed something
unexpected.

"Blog"....in
the coffee. Amazing!

My history
with Deadly Premonition starts around a year after it was originally released.
After hearing so much about this game and how people either hated or loved it,
the quirky characters, and that it's a "cult hit" I finally decided to check it
out for myself. I didn't have an Xbox 360 to rent it and play it on so I
searched YouTube to find a walkthrough of it. Obviously I wasn't going to go
out and buy a 360 just to play this game and I wasn't sure if I would even
watch more than one video of this game online.

After
searching YouTube for a while trying to find a good video to start out on I
came across the first episode of supergreatfriend's LP of the game.

I literally
could not get enough of this LP. I suddenly didn't have time to actually play
games anymore because I had to know what was going to happen next in the story.
By the time I finished watching the entire LP I was in love with the game, the
story, the characters and just how different it was from any other game I had
seen before. It's kind of weird to say, but during that time my earlier
statement was no longer valid. As I was itching to buy an Xbox 360 just so I
could play Deadly Premonition.

Well the 360
never came which was probably best for this college student with a tight
budget. I still had hopes of buying a 360 someday, and when that day eventually
came I would pick the game up and have fun actually playing it. That day came
much sooner than I expected, with the announcement of the director's cut to the
PS3. I can't really describe how excited I was the day I heard this news, but
it went something like this.

My plan was
to go out and buy this the day it released, but irony is a funny thing. I
couldn't find the game to save my life. My local game store didn't have it, and
the two GameStops and the BestBuy in the next town didn't have it either.
Finally after about a week I walked into my local store to find one copy of the
game sitting on the shelves. I instantly nabbed it and skipped happily all the
way home.

I've been playing the game whenever I can and I'm a little over five hours into it. Here's my thoughts on it so far:

What's been nice:

The
story and the characters are still great and weird just like I remember. Agent
York is one quirky son of a gun that I can't get enough of. The added scenario
or cutscenes have been fun to watch. I'm looking forward to seeing where they
lead to.

The
graphics or I guess I should say "enhanced" graphics look nice. However, I'm
not a very big critic when it comes to graphics in games. It doesn't take much
to satisfy me in that department.

Controlling
York feels like I would expect from a third person game. From what I've heard
the controls for the 360 version were tough to get used to. I would say the
updated controls are the best improvement made in this version. Driving a car
is still a clunky mess, but I think that's the way Swery wants it to be.

What's not so nice:

There's
been "mini-freezes" happening throughout the game. It's not hurting my
enjoyment of the game, but it does start to get annoying when it happens every
10 seconds in certain situations. So far I've only experienced a couple places
in the game where the framerate was at a crawl.

Using
the map still sucks. I was really hoping they would make the map easier to use,
but it didn't happen. The problem is that you can't zoom out far enough to
really see what route you need to take to get to your destination. By hitting
the select button while driving you can make the mini map pop out so you can
see more. This is nice, but I would've rather them make the select button go
straight to the map page and to let you zoom out to where you can see the
entire map. I printed out a map made by a user on GameFaqs that I've been using
instead.

You
still can only save to one file. I'm not sure if there's a reason to this that
I'm not seeing, but I was hoping the DC would let you save to more than one. It's
a little scary playing a game this big with only one save file. Oh well.

Implementing
Move controls and 3D into the game. I just look at adding these features to the
game as a waste of time and energy. They could have spent more time improving
areas of the game *cough*map*cough* instead of adding this crap.

Overall, I'm
having a great time playing Deadly Premonition. I'm going to be taking my time with this one. Even though I know what's going to happen in the end I'm just excited that I'm actually playing and experiencing this wonderful game. After having a thirst to play
this for the past two years the coffee is still just as good as I remember it.